Davis went on to stress that the only thing that separates women of colour from anyone else is opportunity: “You cannot win an Emmy for roles that are simply not there.”

This month she was nominated again, for a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild award, for her role as controversial defence lawyer Annalise Keating in How to Get Away With Murder, but the Emmy speech was hugely symbolic, she tells me, in terms of inspiring young girls – “young brown girls, especially”.

Yes, she had planned the speech (along with her husband, Julius Tennon, Davis is working on a project about Tubman for HBO), but it was inspired by the conversations she’s had in private about the “roadblocks” facing women of colour. “I know the ropes, I’ve been in the casting offices, I’ve felt the discrimination, I’ve felt ‘the line’… so when someone gives me a stage to be able to say something, it’s already in there. By the time you’re 50, you have a built-in narrative of your own.”

Her boldness was inspiring. “Sometimes there is no sugar-coating it. Sometimes you have to challenge people’s belief systems in a progressive way,” she says.

Davis is no ingenue. She’s been acting for 35 years. She’s had two best supporting actress Oscar nominations – for 2008’s Doubt (as the mother of a boy who may have been sexually assaulted by a priest) and 2011’s The Help (as the maid Aibileen). On Broadway, she won a Tony for Fences, opposite Denzel Washington.

But it’s her casting as Annalise Keating that has allowed her to play “a messy, mysterious dark-skinned woman who looks like me”.

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The show was created by US writer/producer Shonda Rhimes (Grey’s Anatomy). Davis found the complexity of her character refreshing after so many bland TV roles for women. “I look at them sometimes and don’t recognise them. They’re watered-down femininity. Like when your mom told you to make sure when you sat down to keep your legs closed, or not mess up your hair, it’s the famous saying: ‘The well behaved woman seldom makes history.’ And it’s very true. But in our lives we are bold, we are messy, we are psychotic at times, and then we are very beautiful and well spoken,” she adds dreamily, “and sensitive and loving, and all of those expansive things that men can be.”

In an infamous scene from season one of How to Get Away With Murder, Davis removed her wig and peeled off her false eyelashes to confront her cheating husband. “I said I would only take the job if I could take my wig off, but really that was a metaphor for something much larger. I’ll play a mysterious, sexualised woman if I can explore why she’s mysterious and sexual because that’s the only thing that’s going to make her human – and that’s the only thing I know to do. I don’t know how to smoke around in Alexander McQueen outfits, or diet myself down to a size two.

“It’s all about the choices you make,” she adds. “And what I mean by that is the choice of how you look, how you do your hair, how you choose to show your body. If the writer says: ‘What do you think?’, well, what are you telling them? In 2015, just like people say men have to ‘man up’, we have to ‘woman up’ and live our truths through our work and define ourselves in our terms, not the Mr Potato Head model of male desirability.”

Davis was born in South Carolina and grew up in Rhode Island. She didn’t meet her sister, Diane, until she was five and Diane was nine because their parents couldn’t afford to raise them together. She discovered a love of acting early in high school, took a degree in theatre, then attended Juilliard School in New York. For years she eked out a living doing theatre and “third girl from the left” film roles.

How to Get Away with Murder: Shonda Rhimes' take on the procedural

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But she never stopped dreaming, just like her sister. “My sister, Diane, was brought up in segregated schools in the south. She was the first member of the family to go on to college, she was National Honour Society. I said to her: ‘Where did you get that goal from?’ And what gave her permission was the first time she saw an indoor toilet. She grew up on my grandmother’s plantation that we were born on, there were outhouses, and then for the first time she saw a pristine indoor bathroom with a white sink and a toilet and a bathtub. I’m sure people think it would make a better story if she were inspired by a Nikki Giovanni poem, but you don’t know where the inspiration is going to come from,” she says triumphantly.Today, Davis lives in Los Angeles with her husband and adopted daughter, Genesis. In the pipeline are projects about civil rights activist and congresswoman Barbara Jordan, and Vee-Jay Records, which preceded Motown. Getting funding is hard, she tells me. “Reese Witherspoon, who I love by the way, can say: ‘I use my own money for my movies.’ I don’t have Reese Witherspoon money. As much as I’m on the A-list, it still requires a big white male or female star for me to even get a movie deal. And I’m not saying that with a lack of gratitude for the position I’m in now. I’m not complaining. It’s absolutely an honest observation. There are very few black females spearheading the movies. That’s not because we can’t; but it’s still a fight.”

How To Get Away With Murder, mid-season finale is on Wednesday 23 December, 9pm, Universal Channel